[101656] in RedHat Linux List
Re: HELP!--Won't boot! What's UTMP?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Cameron Simpson)
Sat Nov 28 04:27:26 1998
Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 20:27:07 +1100 (EST)
X-Original-To: bulbul@ucla.edu
From: Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au>
Reply-to: cs@zip.com.au
To: bulbul@ucla.edu
Cc: redhat-list <redhat-list@redhat.com>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
On 27 Nov 1998, in message <365E550F.33A0F721@csi.com>
Leston Buell <leston@csi.com> wrote:
| Hi. Just yesterday i installed RedHat 5.2 on a 486 to teach Linux to a
| friend. I wasn't having any problems with it. I had successfully booted
| several times. Then, while trying to transfer a file onto the machine
| from a DOS floppy, i encountered an input/output error, which seemed to
| be corrected when i used a different floppy. Then i kept getting these
| warning messages:
| EXT2-fs warning (device 03:01): ext2_free_inode:
| bit already cleared for inode 1932
| while opening UTMP file: Not a directory.
| (I have no idea if the input/output error with the floppy had anything
| to do with this catastrophe.)
Depends what you did to recover - this is a symptom of filesystem
corruption (damage to the data structure on a disc which describes your
files etc).
| Then, all of a sudden, i couldn't log on in any new virtual consoles,
| and such basic commands as shutdown were no longer available. I shut the
| machine down, and tried rebooting, it kept displaying the above message
| over and over again, and also:
| INIT cannot execute /etc/rc.d/rc
Sounds like the trouble spread. That's the trouble with file system damage;
like any damaged data structure, some of it is now nonsense. The kernel,
traversing the structure to fulfil your requests, will believe this nonsense if
it has cause to use it, and do further damage.
| So, in despair, i made a rescue disk, and successfully ran ext2fsck
| (e2fsck?) on hda1. (Yeah!)
This should have been done earlier. As a rule of thumb, the moment you get
some error from the filesystem, it's best to stop using it RIGHT AWAY.
Continued use will readily do further damage, to the point of serious
corruption.
I.e. on first sight of trouble, shut down (cleanly if possible) and do the
e2fsck rescue thing. A habit to acquire for next time :-)
| It corrected lots of things i didn't
| understand (since i don't know what an inode is).
An inode is the record on disc which describes a file or directory (or
other entity, like a device). The directories themselves are
essentially just lists associating names with inodes.
| When i tried rebooting
| some of the error messages were now absent, but i still get, over and
| over again:
| While opening UTMP file: No such file or directory.
Well, looks like the utmp file (which records the logins of logged in users)
is missing - maybe its parent directory is gone too.
| Is there anything i can do? I'm not really experienced with this; this
| is the first time i've used a rescue disk.
e2fsck has merely made your filesystem sane again. While its decisions
are made with an eye to "repair", it's not inherently goiing to fix
everything (especially in cases where things have been overwritten, for
example, as the original data are then gone). Some stuff it will have
put in the directory lost+found at the top level of the filesystem in
question, but you'd still have to figure out what was what (if
something ends up in there it's because e2fsck couldn't decide where to
attach it for real, so it won't even have a handy name, just some
placeholder name, like "f1").
When things are that mangled, my first choice is a reinstall from
scratch. This needn't mean losing any personal work you've done on the
machine; if the users' data are in a separate filesystem (eg you made a
separate /home of something when you set things up) just ensure to
remember during the install and tell the install not to do anything
with that filesystem - just reattach it yourself by hand afterwards.
If the data are so separated, take copies of it onto separate media (eg
floppies or a Zip disc) before the install.
If that's too inconvenient, which is certainly can be, you have some
repair work ahead. (My preference for a reinstall is because it leaves
me with a system I know is good - manual repair piecemeal leaves me
wondering what I missed, waiting to bite me later).
Cheers,
--
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@zip.com.au http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/
I can't see any reason to fear the white pointer shark.
- Kieran "Bunduki, Fearless Master of the Jungle" Larkin
<kieran@research.canon.com.au>
--
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